Posted on 02/27/2007 5:57:42 AM PST by A. Pole
Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon argue that religion is a delusion or, at best, a misfiring of basic cognitive systems evolved for other more useful purposes like “agent detection” and placebo responding. But the authors do not believe that the delusion is harmless. Instead, they make clear that they see religion as a major source of evil in the world and go so far as to say that the religious instruction of children is “child abuse” when unaccompanied by countervailing scientific instruction.
If Dawkins and Dennett really believe that raising a child in a religious tradition is abusive, then they are morally bound to call for the protection of children subject to such abuse. Theoretically, abusers should be subject to legal penalties and perhaps even jailed. The state, in such cases, should use its coercive powers to restrain abusive parents and require them to undergo some sort of psychiatric treatment or thought-retraining program to cure their delusionary illness.
Given the widespread nature of the delusion—both authors cite statistics showing that better than 64 percent of the U.S. population believes in God—America’s psychiatric system will have to be expanded. It may be necessary to build retraining camps similar to those used throughout the Communist world to free recalcitrant religionists from their delusional devotion to God and their irritating resistance to the state. Too bad we can’t all be “brights,” as the merry band of Dawkins- and Dennett-inspired atheists has dubbed itself. If only everyone were as emancipated as the brights from religion’s dangerous spell, the world would be a better place!
Why can’t religionists see the error of their ways, especially when the bright brights point this out to them? It must be that they are stupid. Dawkins is so convinced of the religion-as-delusion equation that he seems to endorse the long discredited notion of a correlation between high religiosity and low intelligence.
Yet no convincing data exist to warrant such a claim. There is, however, a well-attested inverse correlation in many Western cultures between years of education (not I.Q.) and religiosity, but most scientists who study religion believe that the correlation simply indexes one’s level of exposure to the secular culture regnant in most Western universities. It simply demonstrates, in short, one’s level of servility toward and indoctrination in that culture.
Dennett, to his credit, forthrightly raises the issue of who should teach the children about religion and very carefully treads the issue’s thorny ethical undergrowth. At first, he seems to suggest that rules of informed consent should apply, but then in the spirit of the robust and kind-hearted tolerance he wishes to advance, he very magnanimously proposes that parents “may teach their children whatever religious doctrines they like” as long as they “don’t teach their children anything that is likely to close their minds 1) through fear or hatred or 2) by disabling them from inquiry (by denying them an education, for instance, or keeping them entirely isolated from the world).”
Is Dennett blind to the potentially enormous implications of these proposed rules? Who decides when a child is being taught to hate or fear? Who decides when a child’s mind is closed? Perhaps a specially educated elite of informed intellectuals should make such decisions; perhaps properly certified guardians; perhaps ministers of the state.
But Dawkins and Dennett should not be tarnished as a pair of unwitting forerunners of a new set of thought-control programs. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist who holds the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, and Dennett is a philosopher and Director of the Center for Cognitive Science at Tufts University. The two men have often been allies in the fight to defend Darwinian evolutionary science against the so-called creationists and the intelligent-design people. Dawkins first came to prominence in the 1970s on the strength of his book The Selfish Gene, which led to a more gene-centered view of evolutionary change. In such a perspective, organisms exist to propagate genes—not the other way around. He also later suggested that the basic units of cultural evolution might be called “memes,” which can be thought of as sets of basic ideas that use the minds of humans as vehicles to proliferate and immortalize themselves. Both Dawkins and Dennett tend to see religion as a set of virulent and harmful memes, but little or no scientific evidence supports this view.
Dennett has made a number of important contributions to the philosophy of mind. His 1992 book, Consciousness Explained, debunked theories of consciousness in which a little observing man or homunculus sat somewhere at the back of the mind of the individual and did all of the hard work of being conscious. Dennett’s 1996 book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, advocated extending Darwin’s idea of the mechanism of natural selection to virtually all human experience.
Dawkins and Dennett’s intellectual honesty and dedication to liberty of thought preclude their endorsement of the state’s use of coercion to combat religious delusion. But their belief that religion is delusion appears to have led them into a position inimical to liberty of thought. A fair reading of the science of religion suggests in any case that religion is not mere delusion or cognitive error but a complex suite of biocultural behaviors shaped by standard evolutionary forces and consequently ingrained deeply into the biology of the human psyche. It is pointless and counterproductive to equate religion with stupidity, abuse, and brainwashing, as such language only obscures the complex nature of religion and compounds this obscurantist move with an open invitation to reformers and state planners to regulate, restrict, and control yet another realm of human choice and behavior.
The fact that religion has an evolutionary history is no guarantee, however, that it is good for people. Murder has an evolutionary history too, and we do not (usually) promote murder. But neither do we describe murder as an instance of mere delusion. The label “delusion” here would be a category mistake, just as it is in the case of religion. But to the extent that ideas have consequences—and they do—this is one category mistake that could lead to disastrous social policy.
Instead of a research paradigm built around the old canard that religion is delusion, what’s needed to throw light on both the constructive and destructive aspects of religiousness is concerted, well-funded, long-term research on religion and religiousness and a careful dissection of their natural functions. Whatever natural functions are discovered will not, of course, preclude discussion of the question of religion’s basic truth value. Neither will it foreclose discussion of whether God exists. Instead, developing a natural history of religion will simply clear away all of the pointless chatter about religion being a delusion and free us from all the zealous reformers who want to save us from our own innate religiousness.
While calling for the development of a science of religion, however, Dawkins and Dennett, I fear, have already concluded that there is really no substantial phenomenon to be studied at all, since they believe that religion is mere delusion. Why then do the research if the jury’s verdict is already in?
The fact that people believe in agents unseen so outrages Dawkins and Dennett that they call religion virulently harmful. Apparently, they look at all of the charities, universities, hospitals, orphanages, clinics, poor houses, soup kitchens, and shelters financed and run by religious groups and conclude not only that all of these establishments mean nothing in comparison to the monstrous acts perpetrated by brainwashed religionists, but also that religion needs to be done away with completely. Dawkins in particular too easily dismisses the concern that massive crimes have also been committed by antireligious ideologues like Robespierre, Pol Pot, Hitler, and Stalin. He claims that these crimes were not committed in the name of atheism. Perhaps Dawkins does not read history as carefully as he reads the book of nature. All of the aforementioned individuals and many other anti-religious ideologues, like the early 20th-century Mexican revolutionaries, explicitly carried out programs of mass murder in the name of their militantly atheistic ideologies. These despots knew that they had to crush religious organizations and “erase the infamy” of religious belief and intolerance if they were ever to control the populations of their countries.
Religion, like any other human enterprise, should not be off limits to scientific study or public scrutiny. But curiously, for all of their calls for enhanced scrutiny and study of religion, Dawkins and Dennett seem hellbent on ignoring one of the most basic scientific findings of modern research on religion: namely, that religiousness is not due to stupidity, error, delusion, or trance.
Instead, religiousness appears to be sui generis—a phenomenon unto itself that cannot be reduced to more fundamental cognitive operations (though like any other biocultural adaptation, it utilizes more fundamental cognitive systems in its operations). Religiousness may even turn out to be a normal biologic trait strongly influenced by standard, nonmysterious evolutionary forces. Like that other quintessentially human skill, language, religiousness displays many of the telltale signs of a classic, evolutionarily-shaped adaptation or suite of adaptations. It is found, for example, in all known human cultures, and furthermore, it is heritable. When one twin is religious, the other will likely be religious as well. Its “heritability coefficient” is moderately high, ranging from .40 to .70 (compared to heritability coefficients for traits that most scientists see as adaptations such as basic personality traits—.40 to .60—or intelligence—.50 to .60). Genes, such as the VMAT2 and the DRD4, are consistently associated with high scores on religiousness scales. And religiousness is now known to exhibit a definite brain basis: some drugs enhance religiousness, while others diminish it, and some brain regions are more consistently associated with religiousness than others.
All of the foregoing evidence is consistent with the idea that religiosity is an adaptation—not a mere delusion. Given that it is an adaptation, it is not surprising that basic components of religiosity are spontaneously acquired by children, who come to believe in omniscent supernatural agents in a relatively effortless manner. Children do not need to be force-fed religion because they naturally develop religion’s basic component processes.
Why then do Dawkins and Dennett persist in treating religion as mere delusion or “spell”? Doing so leads them to reinvent the nonproblem of religion’s persistence in an era of reason and scientific advancement. Most scholars of religion see no problem here, as religion, for better or worse, is considered the common biocultural inheritance of humankind. But for people who equate religion with stupidity, all sorts of problems arise, including the ethical issue of who will teach children about God.
What sad people they must be.
This disease lasts about 70 years, the recovery is slow and painful (if the patient survives).
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and to find out after my death that he doesn't exist than to believe there is no God and find out after my death that he does exist.
Hey great title. Much better than the ones blaming me for cancer et al.
Who is this God Gene?
I've read of Isis and Zeus, JR "Bob" Dobbs, Quezecotl, and Beelzebub.
But no Gene.......
/s
watch for yourself:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6169720917221820689
These learned men are so presumptuous in their pronouncements; a publish or perish peace if ever there was one. Did they ever mention simple Faith…………?
Bigotry is a terrible waste of brain space.
"Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,"
Also it is better to live as if one were made in the image of God and to struggle to conform to this standard. But some chose to believe to be animals similar to the monkeys.
Seems there's "in fighting" within the ranks, lol. This story didn't get a lot of attention, I'm sure.
There is a God, leading atheist concludes
Philosopher says scientific evidence changed his mind
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6688917/
Here's an ok rebuttal of these a$$hats.
http://richarddawkins.net/articleComments,622,Interview-with-Alister-McGrath-author-of-The-Dawkins-Delusion,Belfast-Telegraph,page2
Alister McGrath (54,), Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University, and his wife Joanna Collicutt McGrath (52), lecturer in the psychology of religion at University of London, hit back in their book The Dawkins Delusion
What about his main argument, that religion leads to violence and oppression?
Dawkins treats this as a defining characteristic of religion, airbrushing out of his somewhat skimpy account of the roots of violence any suggestion that it might be the result of political fanaticism - or even atheism. He is adamant that he himself, as a good atheist, would never fly aeroplanes into skyscrapers, or commit any other outrageous act of violence or oppression. Good for him. Neither would I. Yet the harsh reality is that religious and anti-religious violence has happened, and is likely to continue to do so.
As someone who grew up in Northern Ireland, I know about religious violence only too well. There is no doubt that religion can generate violence. But it's not alone in this. The history of the 20th century has given us a frightening awareness of how political extremism can equally cause violence. In Latin America, millions of people seem to have 'disappeared' as a result of ruthless campaigns of violence by right wing politicians and their militias. In Cambodia, Pol Pot eliminated his millions in the name of socialism. The rise of the Soviet Union was of particular significance. Lenin regarded the elimination of religion as central to the socialist revolution, and put in place measures designed to eradicate religious beliefs through the 'protracted use of violence.' One of the greatest tragedies of this dark era in human history was that those who sought to eliminate religious belief through violence and oppression believed they were justified in doing so.
They were accountable to no higher authority than the state.
Dawkins is clearly an ivory tower atheist, disconnected from the real and brutal world of the 20th century.
If this is in the author's own words, then this is the achilles heel of their argument right here. Evil is a religious concept and means "that which is contrary to the Will of God" and not the secular meaning of "bad". If there is no God, then there is also no evil. They cannot argue that religion is a delusion by employing religious concepts to do so.
Just a bunch of homo-promos that hate anyone who disagrees with them.
In several cases, genetic constructs that perfectly fit the model of Dawkins' "selfish genes" have been found to have a function. (For example, the system that maintains the ends of chromosomes.) And most so-called "junk DNA" (protein-noncoding DNA, once assumed to be "parasitic") has been found to be conserved between different species, so must also be functional. Then there is the protein-noncoding DNA that codes for regulatory microRNAs. Welcome to the weird world of 21st century postdarwinian evolutionary biology!
There is, however, one abundantly verified case of a selfish gene. That, of course, is "Selfish Gene" Robinson!!!! Professional atheists Dennet and Dawkins, in their baseless bashing of religion, are coming close to "selfish gene" status!!!!
The following guy, Peter Singer, of Princeton University, is the leading atheist that everyone should be aware of (what's really sick is that he's a bioethicist and teaches "practical ethics"):
http://www.worldmag.com/articles/9987
Many readers may be saying, "Peter who?"—but The New York Times, explaining how his views trickle down through media and academia to the general populace, noted that "no other living philosopher has had this kind of influence." The New England Journal of Medicine said he has had "more success in effecting changes in acceptable behavior" than any philosopher since Bertrand Russell. The New Yorker called him the "most influential" philosopher alive.
"If the 21st century becomes a Singer century, we will also see legal infanticide of born children who are ill or who have ill older siblings in need of their body parts. Question: What about parents conceiving and giving birth to a child specifically to kill him, take his organs, and transplant them into their ill older children? Mr. Singer: "It's difficult to warm to parents who can take such a detached view, [but] they're not doing something really wrong in itself." Is there anything wrong with a society in which children are bred for spare parts on a massive scale? "No."
When we had lunch a month after our initial interview and I read back his answers to him, he said he would be "concerned about a society where the role of some women was to breed children for that purpose," but he stood by his statements. He also reaffirmed that it would be ethically OK to kill 1-year-olds with physical or mental disabilities, although ideally the question of infanticide would be "raised as soon as possible after birth."
These proposals are biblically and historically monstrous, but Mr. Singer is a soft-spoken Princeton professor. Whittaker Chambers a half-century ago wrote, "Man without God is a beast, and never more beastly than when he is most intelligent about his beastliness," but part of Mr. Singer's effectiveness in teaching "Practical Ethics" to Princeton undergraduates is that he does not come across personally as beastly."
Too bad these scholars cannot explain why Paul, formerly one who persecuted Christians, became a Christian and spread God's Word to us heathens.
Why would a forthright Jew be so convinced that he would give his own life to profess Jesus as our Saviour?
Because he was filled with the love and spirit of God. He spent the rest of his life spreading that love, instead of hate. He died in Christ. Therefore he lived.
Actually, you could say that religion motivated Oliver Cromwell and the English, when they murdered thousands of Irish women and children at such places as Drogheda. But these massacres were also the result of theories of warfare of that time, and they were also a matter of English vs. Irish, conquerors and conquered, resistence and oppression.
OTOH, the modern Irish revolutionary movement, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing through most of the twentieth, was NOT motivated by Catholicism to any great degree. The two factions are conveniently known as Protestants and Catholics, but they are primarily native Irish versus English/Scottish conquerors, with religion to help keep the two groups separate over time. But also there were rules of the conqueror to keep the two groups separate, with the English and Scots firmly in the controlling positions and the Irish not permitted to own a horse, learn to read, or attend a university for a couple of centuries.
The modern IRA is primarily Marxist in orientation, not Catholic. It has never had much if any support from the Irish bishops or the official Church. It would be foolish to say that religion had nothing to do with the hatreds in Ireland, but religion was rarely a primary motivating force for the violence there, except to some degree on the Orange side.
If not for religion, would the bloodshed in Ireland not have occurred? Very doubtful. The primary motivators were conquest, colonialism, repression, and resentment for being oppressed by outsiders.
Did religion cause the split in South Africa? In that case, we turn to race for an explanation, because it marks the most prominent difference. But there is seldom a single cause for such problems. In South Africa there were three or four groups: Zulus, Xhosa, Dutch, English. The Dutch and the English hated each other as much as the Zulus and English. It was not simply a matter of black vs. white, although that came to be the accepted wisdom.
Some religion is stupid and some science is shamanism..
Truth seekers can find there way thru all that..
Dawkins and Dennetts have not.. yet..
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